European left scrambles to regroup on economy

Opinion: Mainstream parties founder in wake of austerity

Alexis Tsipras has led a revival of the radical left in Greece, and could be a role model for European leftists who are disenchanted with the center-left parties that have embraced austerity policies.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — A not-unintended consequence of the austerity policies enforced by center-right European Union leaders to combat the euro
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crisis is the demolition or marginalization of the continent’s mainstream center-left parties.

The most graphic example is in Greece, where the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) that headed a coalition government in 2009 when the crisis broke polled in the single digits, 8%, in last month’s European Parliament elections, a figure that included other center-left splinter parties.

France’s Socialist Party, which won the presidency and an easy majority with its coalition partners in the Legislature in 2012, has also plummeted in voters’ favor, capturing only 14% in the May elections (including an allied party).

Across the continent, from Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), these center-left parties have suffered as they have been co-opted in the name of preserving the euro and the EU into accepting policies that have the greatest impact on organized labor and other middle-class constituencies that are the basis of their support.

In addition, the demise of Marxism, the economic ideology that gave birth to most of these left-wing parties, has deprived them of any coherent counter-arguments to the neoliberal orthodoxy of cutting budgets, slashing the social safety net, reducing the standard of living, and keeping millions unemployed in order to “restore confidence.”

Thus, French President François Hollande, who swept into office with the promise to fight these counterproductive policies, has since embraced them with gusto in order, apparently, to prove to fellow EU leaders that he, too, is a Very Serious Person, to borrow economist Paul Krugman’s ironic characterization of fiscal hawks.

As London-based blogger Tom Gill documents, this has mobilized disaffected members of the Socialist Party and other politicians to the left of Hollande and his new prime minister, Manuel Valls — a fairly wide space at this point — to seek a coalition of the “radical” left to respond to the constituencies left in the lurch.

The goal here, as Gill shows, is to follow the example of Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, whose far-left Syriza party has risen as Pasok has declined, so that it emerged from the European Parliament election as the country’s largest party, with 27% of the vote.

In France, meanwhile, it was the far-right National Front under Marine Le Pen that profited from voter frustration with the malfeasance of the left and garnered the protest votes of those who think Europe needs to go in a different direction.

Whether these left-wing French groups can coalesce into a new force or retake control of the Socialist Party remains to be seen, but it’s clear the left has to find a new footing if it is to beat back the challenge from the far right.

In Germany, meanwhile, the SPD has taken a beating not only because it has been co-opted on European policy, but compromised across the board after succumbing to the temptation to once again join Chancellor Angela Merkel in a grand coalition.

The German electorate, traumatized by the fractious politics of the Weimar Republic that paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power, is far less volatile than the French, so the erosion of support for the mainstream center-left party has been slower, but nonetheless steady, falling from the 35-40% level to just over 25%.

The Greens and the Left Party, two groupings to the left of the SPD, have reaped some of the benefit, but here, too, most of the protest vote went to the right in the May elections, with the upstart Alternative for Germany capturing 7% of the vote.

Despite the massive evidence showing how wrong and misguided austerity policies have been, however, there seems little chance of turning back the neoliberal orthodoxy without an equally coherent counter-argument.

But the neo-neo-marxism of French economist Thomas Piketty has failed to gain much traction in his native country or elsewhere in Europe, even though his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has captured the imagination of progressives in the U.S.

Rather, if Tsipras is truly to be the model for leftist reform in Europe, it is the post-Keynesianism of economists like James Galbraith and Yanis Varoufakis that will provide the intellectual underpinning.

Tsipras was the lead candidate in the May election for the far-left group in the European Parliament, the European United Left, and increased its representation by 50% from the 2009 election, to 52 seats in the 751-seat body.

In Italy, a political grouping called “The Other Europe with Tsipras” managed to cross the 4% hurdle for representation in the European Parliament.

In Spain, a new leftist party that takes its name, Podemos (“We can”), from President Barack Obama’s campaigns, nonetheless cites Tsipras as its inspiration, and won 8% of the vote in May.

It is the challenge for politicians like Tsipras and whatever other new leaders may emerge on the European left to show voters an alternative economic philosophy and what it can mean for their lives.

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